In this post I would like to expatiate on a technique which has been hinted at previously (and so which may already be familiar to regular readers), though which I’d like to make explicit, and, what’s more, within the context of a post which outlines one of the most practical uses for that technique.

As most readers will no doubt know, the vast majority of Excel functions are able to ignore Booleans (and sometimes, where appropriate, other non-numerics) within the range passed. As such, they effectively operate over a reduced range which comprises the non-Booleans (or numerics) only, allowing us to include conditional statements (generally using IF) within our function so as to restrict which values are – ultimately – processed by our construction.